Designing online with Pinterest

Popular website a useful tool for finding home decor inspiration

A sample of the kind of inspiration you can find on Pinterest. This pinboard features "colourful" decorating inspiration. See more here.

Photograph by: Screengrab
, Househunting.ca on Pinterest

Six weeks before Allison Andrew-Harris put her house on the market this spring, she started staging it in an effort to woo potential buyers.

But when it came time to revamp her bookshelves, the co-owner and man-ager of Country Furniture and The Other Room in North Vancouver was surprisingly stumped. Andrew-Harris, an interior designer by trade, couldn't get those bookshelves to look right, even with years of styling experience under her belt and a store full of accessories at her disposal.

"I have huge bookcases and I wanted to make them look as good as possible," Andrew-Harris recalls. "So I lined up all my books and I just hated the way they looked - this is not what I wanted the bookcases to look like! - it's a rec room and I wanted it to look inspiring to people who came to see our house."

Faced with a potential bookshelf boondoggle, what did she do? She didn't consult any magazines or scrap-books for inspiration. She didn't ask designer friends for advice or randomly Google the topic. Instead, Andrew-Harris went straight to her computer, logged on to her Pinter-est account and typed in the word "bookcase".

Instantly, hundreds of hot-looking bookcases appeared on her screen, all decorated in different ways and styles.

Each image was readily available for Andrew-Harris to "pin", saving the ideas on to her own virtual bulletin board, while making a montage to refer back to again and again.

For those who've been accustomed to creating concept image boards and magazine clipping files by hand, Pin-terest has become a game changer when it comes to home décor. It's also a great source for DIY design projects, gardening, fashion, art and cooking.

Launched in beta-testing mode in March 2010, Pinterest has been the fastest growing social media site ever, clocking in over 104 million total visits in March 2012 (third behind heavy hitters Facebook and Twitter, respectively, according to Experian Hitwise, a tracking service for online trends.)

The interface is simple to use. For the visually oriented and curious, the appeal is obvious: Pinterest offers order to Internet bedlam. If you see something you like, no longer do you need to bookmark whole websites (then try to remember what it was on those sites that interested you). Now you simply choose an image and pin it.

After searching and pinning on Pinterest, Andrew-Harris "went to town" on her bookshelves.

"I spent eight full hours merchandising my bookcases and you would not believe how good they looked," she recalls.

She also redid her mantel and her kids' rooms using Pinterest. Today a convert, Andrew-Harris tells all her clients and friends about the site.

Millions of new pins are added to Pinterest every week. Interest is piqued by seeing what other users are pinning instantly, simply by "following" them, and attracting followers to your own boards in turn. If you see something you like on another's Pin-terest, you can let them know by liking it, re-pinning it, and/or commenting on it.

There are no limits to who you can follow and who can follow you, as long as you comply with Pinterest terms of use (which are pretty basic, but stern pertaining to copyright and sourcing, no nudity or hateful content).

However, while anyone can look and search Pinterest, at present, actual membership is by invitation only. You can request an invitation to join at Pinterest.com or ask a friend with a Pinterest account to "invite" you in. And you'll need a Facebook or Twitter to create a new account on Pinterest.

Andrew-Harris has seen a sharp rise in her customers' use of Pinterest, along with her own.

"People just need assistance [with décor] and they don't necessarily want to hire a designer," Andrew-Harris says. "In the past, I'd often say to clients, go through magazines and rip out some photos as inspiration, but now, I'm not going to tell anyone to buy magazines, I'm just going to suggest they go on Pinterest and put a board together."

"I'm a working mom and a store owner myself and I make the time," she says. "In fact, I'm hooked!"

As for the house that Andrew-Harris staged using Pinterest as tool and inspiration?

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